Recently I was contacted by Mr. Robin Howarth of Thelwall Cars to develop a unique image for his new taxi firm. The USP of Thelwall Cars was that of an eco-friendly, ethical taxi company – they would offset their carbon emissions by planting a tree for every 100 miles travelled, so clearly this would provide the base concept behind the new logo design.

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Brief

First and foremost, Robin required a “unique image to attract clients quickly and give me the edge over my competitors”. When I asked for some simple adjectives that should be used to describe his new logo, he thought of terms such as “Ethical, Friendly, Bold, Concise, Professional, Environment, Leafy, Green, Fun”. Robin was also more than happy to leave the rest of the creative criteria entirely in my hands.

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Inspiration and Research

After the initial mindmapping and quick sketching round, I did my usual tour of the Search Engines, seeing what was already out there in terms of eco-friendly taxi companies as well as seeking various images and concepts that I had brought up in my mindmapping session.

The core images and inspirations that would form the new Thelwall Cars logo design

It became very clear that there was a strong relationship between the terms “eco”, “eco-friendly” and the imagery of leaves and trees. It would be advantageous to incorporate such concepts into the logo design. With leaves and trees, of course, brings lots of green colours and I also felt the concept of “roundness” should be important; there should be no straight lines or hard edges in this design – everything should be smooth and round, signifying a more friendly image.

Next, was moving onto one of my favourite stages – deciding on typography. I wanted to use only two typefaces, one for the “Thelwall Cars” text and the other for the rest of the copy. Clearly, as this logo design would feature on cars where visibility could often be poor with the vehicles themselves moving, the typefaces themselves needed to be extremely legible at various distances. I looked through hundreds of different fonts. In the end, I decided on these two.

The two fonts I decided on for the new Thelwall Cars logo design

Advent is a very modern, stylish, elegant and, importantly, legible font and I felt was perfect to use for the ‘Thelwall Cars’ text, whereas VAG Rounded is clear, bold, friendly and functional. I think the two complement each other very well.

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Ideas and Final Conception

So now it was time to play around with actual mark and logotype ideas that I had quickly sketched up and reinforced with the research I done.

Various mark and logotype ideas I had for Thelwall Cars

Colour was going to be very important here and it was this realisation that eventually moved me towards the ‘Unified Block Leaf’ idea. I needed a logo design that would look good, legible, professional, modern and interpolate all the adjectives that we’d discussed before regardless of the colour of the car the sticker design would be put on. Clearly, this meant I couldn’t really use a logo design with lots of blank space as the blank space would essentially be filled by the colour of the car and that could detract from overall effect of the design. So I needed a design that contained all those concepts and adjectives and meanings inside a single, unified design that would work on any colour car.

With this in mind, I refined the uniblock design, added the final details and utilised the typefaces I had designated earlier.

The final design of the new Thelwall Cars logo design

The new Thelwall Cars logo design in a real world case example

From Robin: “I think it looks great! Can’t think of how it could look better to be honest. I love it!”